"Boss, at the earliest the civil war will start within a month."
That was the first thing Mel said in the carriage back to the margravial castle.
Up to that point I wasn't particularly surprised.
If anything, I was pleased.
"A war that's going to happen anyway starting sooner is welcome news."
If war is coming anyway, better to get it over with quickly.
Was there much to prepare in any case?
And wars break out suddenly more often than not.
In the past, a surprise war had even erupted at a peace negotiation.
What surprised me was what followed.
"And....... I looked into the Stalwart Knight a bit!"
The matter of the 'Stalwart Knight.'
My guess had been that a dying knight was kept alive with something like black magic and then magically enhanced.
But.......
"Boss, that bastard was born in a Necropolis."
A truth I had not even imagined was waiting for me.
"What?"
A Necropolis is a castle of death that rules over undead.
Its condition of appearance: deaths in the tens of thousands.
This country's destruction more than satisfied that condition.
The Necropolis born that way—an undead fortress made of corpses and bone—was truly horrific.
'Setting aside its appearance, that productivity above all.......'
For a human to be ready for war takes at least ten years.
Even taking conscripts spent recklessly as the standard.
Undead, by contrast, can be produced without limit so long as the conditions are met.
The hideous sight of a Necropolis belching purple mist and generating undead by the ten thousand made even me feel its oppression.
And that was not all.
"You remember the Death Knight factory, right?"
"You mean the one that turned knights into undead?"
"Yeah."
Turn a knight who possesses aura into undead and you get a Death Knight.
A mage who handles mana becomes a Lich.
These are high-grade undead that even a Necropolis can only make under special conditions.
And among such high-grade undead there are bound to be exceptional specimens—.
"The Stalwart Knight might be a war-chief-grade Death Knight."
"Hah!"
I was too shocked for words.
Undead are undead because they carry out orders without question.
But among them, the ones called chiefs possess a 'self.'
Things that should only appear after the World War began were already hiding among the Ten Great Knights of the Continent and active.
Frankly, I didn't want to believe it.
"The bastard's a knight ranked in the continent's top ten. And you're saying he's a war-chief-grade undead?"
"That's what I think!"
The Stalwart Knight.
The stench of rotting corpses did come from inside his layered magic tools, but—.
"The omens of the World War were already beyond counting."
That the bastard was a knight among knights was a fact so plain it admitted no dispute.
He was one of the few masters of swordsmanship on the continent, and his fidelity to his master ran as deep and profound as his swordsmanship.
I'd fought him, so I knew that better than anyone.......
"I thought he'd merely extended his life with black mana. And he was undead. A world that calls a mere undead one of the Ten Great Knights of the Continent and exalts him—."
It felt as though my head was ringing.
I particularly loathe dwarven and elven undead.
And my fundamental loathing of undead began with the dignity of humankind, so the reality of a mere dead man being called one of the Ten Great Knights struck me that much harder.
"The Stalwart Knight, undead as he is, was playing knight to save the Magic King's face."
"So the Magic King was never a turncoat to begin with."
Siegfried, the Magic King.
King of the Magic Kingdom, whose magical power alone rivaled the Empire's.
In my past life I hadn't known why he'd thrown in with the undead; now I knew.
He must already be the master of a Necropolis hidden somewhere.
Which meant.......
"The dwarf bastards have been off their heads for a long while too."
Dwarves who mass-produce armaments and carry out slaughter.
The bombs they made coveted neither territory nor riches nor people; they were horrific things that erased everything.
And the bastards who leeched off those dwarves and lived off death were the black mages and necromancers.
The depth of the past I knew had changed.
And yet, why was it?
"I'd better hurry a little more."
My body still wasn't fully grown.
And the company had no size to speak of yet.
Yet our field of view had grown this large and wide.
The enemies I'd face were this powerful.
And how welcome that was.
"Are you that happy?"
I, Mercenary King Jack.
For all that I play the good man who doesn't welcome the deaths of the powerless and the weak—.
"I must train."
—I love war, and duels staked on life and death.
I long for blood-reeking battlefields.
And yet dream of peace.
I am this contradictory a being.
And my comrades.
"I really like it when you get like this, Boss!"
They cherish my contradiction dearly.
—Ep. 09 Contradiction.
"Thomson, swing that sword until you drop dead."
"Boss, I think he's already dead?"
"No. Squeeze a little more out of him and he can manage one more swing."
A week had passed since we returned to the Monstrous Strength Mercenary Company's territory.
With civil war coming soon, we secured war funds using the capital of the Panier Barony. (I'd memorized the house's name because the bastard would be supplying Arcane Ore to the mobile fortress later on.)
While Mel put the war funds to work, I began training, and while at it I ran Thomson into the ground.
But the more I ran this one, the more fun it got.
"Thomson, tell me whenever you want to leave. I'll send you off in comfort."
Thomson was a perfect slum youth.
He had no mental fortitude whatsoever to endure high-intensity training like this.
But thanks to the training method Veil taught me, it became possible.
"Big Brother, in my country's army they hung up a bell and trained them under it!"
A unit called the Marine Corps.
There they hung a 'bell of liberation' and ran their soldiers ragged.
An outlandish method by which anyone, at any time, could ring the bell and be sent home.
"Instead of threatening to kill them if they run, telling them they can go home if they want actually works?"
"You fish out the ones who endure though it kills them, rather than the ones who stay because they don't want to die!"
In this respect Veil was a genius.
In fact, after introducing this method to the Monstrous Strength Mercenary Company, recruits decreased but the overall level rose by roughly twenty percent.
The method was working splendidly even at this moment.
Even with Thomson as the only member.
WHIP!
"Urgh——."
Thomson was keeping up with my brutal regimen, punishing his body to the point of death.
He must have fainted over a hundred times in a week, and still he had not once run.
The greenhorn Thomson I'd picked up was a raw gem this hard.
"Look. Thomson swung once more and then fainted."
I said to Mel with a triumphant face.
"Boss, don't you think he understood being sent off in comfort as being killed? With you training right beside him, he probably thought he'd really croak, right?"
As always, Mel distorted my actions with her eccentric way of thinking.
"Nothing beats leading by example. When the water upstream is clear, naturally Thomson presses on too—."
At times like that, you just ignore it and say your piece.
Then Mel would give an amusing reaction like this.
"Boss, you're actually insane. You can't do that to other kids, all right? Train someone like that and they usually die!"
"Would I let him die? I'm the one setting the example first—."
"Anyone else would have taken their own life!!!"
As ever, Mel's notions were unique.
As if there were any moron who would end his own life over hard training.
To begin with, say you want to leave and I let you go.
Well, Mel always seemed to think differently.......
"Haah—. I hope your Spirituality gets strong enough to read people's inner thoughts!"
Yuria, the Mage Corps Commander, used to regard my monstrous strength and Spirituality as an 'omnipotent substance.'
But it wasn't truly omnipotent.
It had no ability to read other people's inner thoughts.
"Urgh....... C-Commander!!"
While we chatted, I injected Spirituality and hauled the dying Thomson upright.
He reflexively snapped to attention and awaited my instruction.
"Go and repeat the basic conditioning."
"Yes, sir!!!"
The path of the sword is not easy.
Building a body that is not swung about by the sword is the basis.
Other bastards might have grumbled that this was no swordsmanship at all, but Thomson, as ever, obeyed without complaint and launched into his endless laps of the parade ground.
I too swelled the muscles of my whole body and made to run my monstrous strength wild so as to resume my own training, but—.
"Boss, how's your progress?"
Mel, who had been staring blankly at the sky, put the question to me with a peculiar look.
Some pigeon had flown off; was that a signal?
The interruptions to my training seemed unusually long today; something was about to break.
"Maybe because the body's young, the growth rate is out of the ordinary."
Jack at sixteen.
A young body grows quickly.
Now that I'd come back and felt it myself, the effect was far more tangible.
For one, I had grown a little taller.
And.......
"Muscle is being rebuilt in an instant."
Someone once called me 'a patient with sensory numbness.'
In some respects that was accurate.
Because I never awakened to aura or mana, nor even to divine power, which they say a powerless farmer can feel.
So to solve this I created a training method of my own.
My own secret art, using my monstrous strength.
"You already look incredibly solid, though."
The method was to inject my monstrous strength into myself and stimulate my body at high speed.
It was similar to the Bone Reforging I was doing on Thomson, except that in my case it was more extreme and more fiery.
And the results were correspondingly, starkly higher.
Wreck a young body and it recovers faster.
And it grows overwhelmingly in proportion.
"The exact figures?"
"Monstrous strength is at fifteen percent of my past life's. Spirituality feels like it's reached two."
Suddenly something felt off.
'She's asking for exact figures?'
Because Mel's question was extremely specific.
'Judging by her expression, it doesn't seem to be bad news.'
There had to be a reason.......
As I tilted my head, Mel delivered most welcome words.
"Guests you'll be glad to see are on their way, Boss."
For a moment I thought it was news of Veil and Yuria.......
"Guests?"
Mel's phrasing was strange.
To me, a guest means an 'enemy.'
Had she meant our comrades, she would have said 'friends are coming.'
Which meant—.
"That's happy news too."
For nearly seven days I had marveled endlessly at the growth of a young body.
And hadn't the chance to check those gains come this quickly?
"Of course! Very happy news."
Mel grinned.
***
In the days when I was called Mercenary King.
Apart from my training, war, and occasionally walking an Ancient Dragon as a hobby, I had no cause to concern myself with chores.
Because my comrades and the company's household handled all the small matters on their own.
If there was one good thing about Mel becoming the Margrave after we regressed—.
"Being a noble sure is comfortable."
It was that I could enjoy a standard of living close to back then.
In a mere week, Mel used her position as margrave to accomplish a great deal.
"Boss, I reorganized the territorial army a bit. I mixed in locals who know the area and planted a load of scouts up in the mountains."
And that was how my guests were found.
"The guests are coming from the east!"
SQUEAK, SQUEAK—.
I polished the blade as I listened to Mel recite the report.
[The Demon Sword That Would Be Strongest If It Did Not Break]
The pitch-black blade glinted.
And the purple gem shone dully, like something about to croak.
I laid a hand on it lightly.......
—Hiik!!!
The feeble soul shrieked in terror.
I had no taste for tormenting the weak, so it just made me feel odd.
"Make one more sound and I'll just break you."
They said he came from the same world as Mel; how could he be this feeble?
"Boss, he was stuck in that mine for a hundred years. Guess that's why he's a bit off."
For the record, during my training hours Mel had been talking with this sword.
"He didn't talk back?"
At first he tried to dominate Mel, so I ground the gem down thoroughly, and now he obeys Mel meekly even without me present.
"How's he going to pick a fight after getting Tendon-Splitting Bone-Dislocation from you?"
Mel clutched her belly and cackled like a guttersnipe.
"I never imagined it would work on a soul as well."
A practical torture martial art I had mastered.
[Tendon-Splitting Bone-Dislocation.]
Veil's trashy books are mostly garbage.
But among them, useful things existed, exceedingly rarely.
Most of those were techniques called martial arts, and I realized or developed some of them and made them wholly my own.
Gathering them, I named them separately: [Monstrous Strength Swordsmanship].
"The terrifying Boss who wrecks even a sword with Tendon-Splitting Bone-Dislocation!"
I wrapped up the small talk here and got to the point.
"Who are the guests?"
"One of the nobles you met at the banquet."
The guest's identity was one that stirred my interest greatly.
No less than—.
"It's that count who said he has dwarves."
"A bastard who keeps his promises."
Laughter burst out of me.
He'd said he'd come in person to repair the dwarven-made piece.
And wasn't he coming to see me at the head of an army, no less?
"That's not all, is it?"
If it ended there, she wouldn't be my strategist.
As expected, just as I predicted.
"There really are dwarves with them."
Mel said she had spotted, among the enemy soldiers, hideous dwarves with notably short legs, giving off a repellent air.
The deranged dwarves who made killing tens of thousands with a single bomb 'the basis of war.'
A race that violates human dignity in a way different from the undead.
"I'll make them good dwarves."
I ground my teeth and resolved.